HELL DRILL

In a gruesome new ritual, American "mass casualty" simulations are training kids and cops on how to handle a real school shooting spree.

- C. J. Chivers

Some students remembered the unceasing screams of children calling for help, or the sight of peers wailing over seemingly lifeless friends. A parent recalled her rising discomfort over how realistic the artificial wounds and blood were. A fire chief marveled that one student performed the role of a despondent teenager so well that she fooled him and three other first responders into thinking she needed real medical help, and left an emergency medical technician in tears.

On a Saturday in early June, less than two weeks after a shooting in a school in Uvalde, Texas, killed 19 students and two teachers, the village of Greenport, New York state, a small coastal community on Long Island, held an exercise for first responders to sharpen their handling of a crime that in recent years has become common enough to enter crisis-response routine. The exercise at Greenport High School, which involved 62 simulated victims and roughly 240 first responders from multiple public-safety agencies and firefighting districts, was not directly related to the delayed and bungled handling of the shooting in Uvalde. It had been part of the local fire chiefs' agenda since early January when first assistant chief Alain de Kerillis of the Greenport Fire Department proposed putting the simulation on the year's training calendar. The world we live in now, he said, requires preparation so departments will be logistically and psychologically ready. "Thirty years ago, back in the late '80s and early '90s, we just fought a fire and had a couple of beers afterward and said, 'Oh, this is great," de Kerillis said in an interview at the fire station in mid-June. "Something is really wrong with what's going on. So how do you mentally prepare?"

"SOMETHING IS REALLY WRONG WITH WHAT'S GOING ON. SO HOW DO YOU MENTALLY PREPARE?" -firefighter Alain de Kerillis